I 'VE only one book that's rea 11 y worth while talking about this week, and that is .. _ "The Bright Land':' by Janet Ayer Fair- bank, published by Houghtun Mifflin. This is a novel of what one might call the post-pioneer period in the Middle West, of those decades between the War of 1812 and the Civil War when, the actual frontier having by now been pushed across the Mississippi and even farther westward, the descendants of the early settlers of 0 hio, Indiana, and Kentucky busied themselves in con- solidating the gains their grandfathers had made. It was a wild, paradoxical, extrava- gant time. On the streets of even the largest towns you would still see bands of half-savage Indians roaming, but in the houses you would find pianofortes that had been trekked over the Alle- ghenies from Philadelphia, and ladies in evening gowns imported, via New Orleans, from Paris. Fortunes were made almost overnight; indeed, whole industries sprang into being, flourished, and decayed with equal rapidity, as fur-trading gave way to lumbering, as the river packet ousted the stage- coach and then was itself challenged by the railroad. Towns boomed and were deserted, according to changing circumstance. The whole era reached its dazzling climax with the discovery of gold in California; the Civil War brought it definitely to an end. M Rs. FAIRBANK'S novel, beginning in 1825 and ending in the eighties, covers this period completely in point of time, and manages also to give a remarkably compendious picture of the varied events that went on in it. Abby-Delight Flagg, a New Hamp- shire girl of the strictest Yankee up- bringing, returns home from a year at a "female seminary" in Andover and meets Stephen Blanchard, himself on a visit from his new home in the West. What little she knows about him is unfavorable, for the Blanchards had always had a wild name in the com- munity; indeed, it was because of some scandal that Stephen's father had emi- grated. But she is full of woes, mainly having to do with a momentary in- fatuation for a young theological stu- dent and her father's harshness about BOOKS Panorama it, and when Stephen pleads with her to run away with him she does so, in an elopement that begins with a melo- dramatic pursuit of the pair by her father across half of New England and ends with their arrival in the booming and boisterous town of Galena, then a thriving metropulic;; of northern Illinois. W ELL, the rest of the book, speak- ing briefly, is devoted to the story of her gradual adjustment to the West- ern way of things, and to the chroni- cling of her married life with Stephen. The marriage is a happy one, and hence uneventful-in the dramatic sense, at least; in fact, the plot interest through- out the book is of the slightest, and depends on such rather absurd episodes as a wild horse back ride in the night because Abby-Delight believed (mis- takenly, it turned out) that Stephen had been injured, and the even more incredihly melodramatic one of the husband's innocent embrace of another lady, which. is seen and mis- interpreted by the wife. Ru t as far as that goes, the plot itself :-..1'..*'" , ' , , :':';/;;':';:. AC .' . .." 4:f?-:..:r:. <. .:>: \. . .: .. ,<' '.'* ,...; , jJ!f ..' ., , :j..1t.... 43 is only the sketchiest framework to give definite fictional value to the book. What drama it contains derives from the impact of history on the couple: their life in good times and bad, their fluctuations as the social current changes, the effect on them of such Ininor catastrophes as the failure of a lead mine, or of such major ones as the Civil War. Of all this, of the gen- eral course of society during the period, as reflected in the lives of her char- acters, Mrs. Fairbank writes with a splendid eloquence and a sure under- standing, and if the plot seems at times a little rambling, its wide wanderings at least serve to justify the almost panoramic picture of the times she has provided us. F or she does (though she does have to stretch a bit now and then to do it) Inanage to get into her picture a little of almost everything that typified the period: prairie menus and formal din- ners in New York, old-fashioned rail- road schedules and Mississippi steam- boat scenes, descriptions of opera nights in New Orleans and of primitive -- .' " ">"?Y ." "',' -/ !'\ . , i b wj ! ) '$ i' ' j : ..: . , ,..., . ". ..:' :. .... . :4.tk "', . ::i fi-. " ' J&&t. .::. . .. . ","'. " ... ":$ '\: -:' -:(:'''''.... :::.l; /;'? ..> @. .'.:-x=::: ,,:,'l ;. .....::}.' . . t: '. !: ''';/! ':( '>;.. .:' '* : .,,;. .., ' ;;i , '" , ,;:::: ...'.: ::I' ;:' :: :..;. '. " '"*Wi .-' '" ",,1/1 . rl/Ä\ '}Ììjii\if,J' :;: ;: i; J! ; ;; : M,i;:;i;: \. , }ë;: ::: :'.::: ' ":::;::::':'.'." "'. ..;. "Good news, Mrs.. Jenkins! (Lady Chatterley's Lover' comes to you next."